


And Here the World Will Pass Us By

by Celestial_Evolution



Category: WolfQuest
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:48:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25811608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celestial_Evolution/pseuds/Celestial_Evolution
Summary: Floppy was a Moose. Moose weren't herd animals. But she guessed she didn't mine when one came crashing into to share her home.
Kudos: 2





	And Here the World Will Pass Us By

**Author's Note:**

> You probably don't need to actually know much about WolfQuest for this, since it is just an (admittedly very nice!) wildlife simulator. But hey, if you are a fan of the games, I've put a few more notes at the bottom explaining my thought process for this fic. Enjoy!

The branches that sprawled over the concrete fence were covered in soft buds, and Moose liked them much better than the dry, cold bark she'd been pulling off from where it grew past the fence. Aside from the rain, she liked the weather better too, warm beams soothing her back that she stood out in until the air cooled enough to nip again. Each night segued into another morning of scratching against the corner of a crate, browsing, staring out the barrier she'd never been outside with her nose almost pressed against it.

Her routine, sometimes, was broken by a mousing fox in the brush, an eagle's screech, a myriad of sounds whose owners couldn't reach her but that she gazed toward, ears alert, all the same. Not out of actual fear so much as boredom, a dull curiosity that something would happen worth watching, because it had been a long, long time since those were the things that made her afraid. Not since she was a calf whose instincts prepared her only for the world she hadn't been born into, instead of the one she was, with predators she couldn't fight nor run from like the wild ones.

Like wolves.

Today, she watched wolves.

They were loud wolves. Probably the pack that lived over the hill, always howling and carrying on as they did. The brush parted before them like water, with the same swift rustle. The elk they ran down was even louder. She was a blur of pounding legs, hooves throwing stones (one hit a wolf; Moose heard it yelp), a bleat of pain when one latched onto her heel. She took a hard right after kicking it off, bunching up as if she meant to clear the fence before, surely, she realized she wouldn't make it. The wolves blocked all her other exits, a wall of endless shades of brown and black and gray, save for one. This gray was a steep hill, rising up over Moose's pen and dotted with massive boulders.

The elk slammed her hooves down, scattering the wolves a bit. It wasn't much. Just enough to send them skittering a short distance away, still semi-circled around her, still watching with lolling tongues. When she ran again, they loped after, stretched-out notes of a long-practiced song and dance.

Her chord left them stumbling. It left her stumbling, too, in a more literal sense. She careened up the hillside, running low to the ground, and Moose lost sight of her behind the solid stone of the fence. When the elk reappeared again, it was at the hill's peak, each step clipping against solid stone. The wolves were behind, ears pricked, tails straight out behind.

The wolves lunged.

The elk jumped.

As wolves typically did not fly, they didn't follow. Elk, also, typically did not fly, and this one thudded quite solidly into the ground, cloud of dirt flying up around her and bellow tearing through the air. Moose eased back from her watching place, ears pinned to the sides of her head, and if Moose had a concept of miracles, she might have thought it one that the elk hadn't snapped her neck after the drop. And an even greater one that she got up, launching into another sprint through the maze of the crates.

She breezed pass Moose when she emerged, and Moose snorted and lowered her head to stand her ground out of instinct (watching was one thing; something actually finding its way in there with her was another), taking her eyes off the wolves to watch the elk reach the steep, pathless rise that marked the back of the pen. The fenceless part that tempted with false promises of escape. The elk learned this right away, slipping back down as soon as she tried to climb. She trembled, stuck at the bottom. Moose could see the whites of her eyes and the gashes on her shoulders and legs.

When they heard a whine, they both looked toward the hill. The wolves milled around, watchful. Some were lying down. Some paced. One put a single paw on the rocks as if it also meant to jump, then scrabbled back when stones skipped down beneath it. There were no attempts after that.

The tension began to ease from the elk's frame. Her tail flicked. And finally, she looked away from the wolves. At Moose. And Moose stared back.

Having another creature on this side of he fence was…. New. One of this size, anyway. Hares hopped in, now and again, to flee coyotes or nibble on thistleweed. Birds of various feathers nested on all the surfaces. The difference between the elk and all of them was that they could leave whenever they pleased. The elk couldn't.

When night fell, stars draped over the whole empty town, the wolves had long abandoned the pen, back to wherever which they came. Moose didn't even watch them go.

She watched the elk that didn't.

The elk cried for her herd, with bleats more like a lost kitten's mewl. She called from the ground, legs tucked daintily to protect her wounds. All of the first evening she was there. If she grazed, she stretched out her neck to pull up the blades of grass around her. Moose looked her way, now and again, to see if the elk had moved, had left, had somehow gotten herself out of the pen when Moose never could. She was still there each time, in the same spot, as if flattening the grass was her ultimate goal, and she called and called and called.

By morning there was still no herd, because no doubt they thought her dead. And by morning there were no cries, because the elk had given up. She hobbled by the crates, picking at spring growth, and glanced Moose's way every time the latter took a step. Close enough to not lose sight. Far enough to not offend. Perhaps she knew, on some level, that Moose didn't care for herds as she did, that Moose was no substitute for one even if they both had hooves and both ate new shoots of vegetation and both were stuck together now.

She shifted from grazing to browsing when Moose took her place at the chain link to catch a glimpse of mule deer stotting down the road, and there was no sound except the elk yanking at branches and the wind rattling the fence.

Thus their days fell into routine.

At some point, the elk was just Elk, and her wounds healed, and she was as reliable a satellite to Moose as the moon to the Earth. Distant in the mornings, in some corner of the pen to pick at dew-soaked grass. As the sun shifted, so did she, until she was very nearly right by Moose's side, would have been right by if the latter didn't demand a certain distance between Elk and her own meal, a lesson Elk had been chased off enough to learn. They dozed close by if it got too hot, too dull, too many reasons that the urge for a midday nap might strike them. And by night, they parted again, Elk back in her corner to sit or graze or scratch against whatever she could find, and sometimes she cast glances Moose's way as if afraid.

Moose thought nothing of it, but if she had, she would have thought it fair. Nights were when the bad things happened, and the stars were the witness to the terror that gripped her each time they fell, her nervous pacing, the toss of her head, the way she remembered nothing until morning came again, coming back to awareness of her surroundings and herself: the ache in her neck and legs and throat as if she'd been running, spasming, screaming.

She wouldn't go back into the building she'd been born in. Even though she could, with the door long kicked down. Even with the ones that had hurt her gone, leaving only memory and silence behind. If Elk went in to scope, Moose hovered by the door and called now and again. But she never followed. Wouldn't ever follow, and the tension she felt wouldn't ease until Elk sauntered back out without a trace of sharing the fear.

Far better were the times they peered together out the gate, to see what they could see, together in separation from the rest of the world. Elk, sometimes, butted into her lightly as they stood, or groomed her with a swipe of her tongue across Moose's fur. And she spoke in that way elk did, more to hear the sound herself than anything.

Birds called overhead, and maybe they were calling back.

The herd came at the peak of summer, in the dog days when neither Elk nor Moose could much be bothered to leave whatever shade they scrounged up, tucked under heat-withered trees. It started with what could have been a slow clap of thunder, steady and looming ever closer. Thunder, though, came with lightning, came in waves, not this constant drum. A sound far from the usual ones they heard with in the pen. Different enough to lure Moose from her dozing spot to press against the gate and peer as far as she could. Even then, she didn't see them right away, until they appeared in her line of sight as a mass of dividual brown, splitting into more and more distinct forms as they came closer. The bull's antlers peeked out above the backs of the cows, curved and sharp, above even the thin prongs of the spikes not yet chased off.

It had been seasons since Moose had seen the herd properly, because even when Elk stumbled in, it had been alone. Because the reasons she was trapped was the same reason they generally avoided this place. Even now, Moose could see the wariness in their forms, the constant glances about, the way not a one laid down. Their focus was on eating. And once that was done…. It was doubtful they would linger.

They chattered to each other in the meantime, soft and musical and distant.

Moose flicked her ears when another bleat sounded, closer.

Elk picked her way across the lot to stand by her, pressing nearly completely against the fence before balking away and stepping back. She cried again, more loudly this time, and across the gate, a few of the herd looked up. Their tails wiggled and they didn't stop chewing for a moment, but their eyes trailed solidly on Elk, seeing her as she saw them. One cow took a step forward, then a second step, nose outstretched. Elk herself tried the same, until her nose bumped the gate again. For a moment after, she stood stock-still. Moose studied her, and shifted a few steps away.

When Elk reared, anything in its right mind would have moved away.

Her hooves slammed down on the fence, and the metal clanged with the impact. The chain lock on the gate rattled like bone. It also didn't budge. Moose could have told her it wouldn't, were she able to speak, because she'd tried enough times herself. Again and again and again. Elk tried again too, with a harder blow that left her panting after. She wheeled and kicked it. Everything she could think of until exhaustion from the heat and exertion was too much to bear. At the end of it all, she was left limply pacing alongside.

The herd backed away, startled, and gave Elk anxious stares. Ready to flee from her instead of coming closer. Nor could she go to them. She was stuck. The herd was unreachable. _She was trapped_.

And she always would be.

The elk, slowly, returned to their browse. Moose had never left hers. Elk didn't cry anymore. When one did cut through, it wasn't hers, but one of the spike's, a deep bellow that cut the air as swiftly and sharply as the wing of a diving falcon. All heads whipped toward him to look. For a moment, time seemed to slow.

Wolves barreled down the hill. Wolves that Moose knew, and wolves that Elk knew, and wolves that the herd knew. Wolves that sent every elk in the vicinity flying, or near enough to it, with the way they bolted as one. Not just the herd; Elk bolted too, careening further into the pen and away from a too-familiar memory, whites of her eyes bright on her face. She ran even though the herd and the wolves were already far in the opposite direction, arcing off to a side in the elks' bid to lose their pursuants up the hillside.

Another scream heralded the plan's failure. One elk had gone down. The rest of the herd wouldn't be wondering back anytime soon. In the corner of the pen, Elk tossed her head and pawed at the ground. Moose took a half-step away from the gate, a few more toward where Elk huddled, and stopped halfway. She didn't – couldn't – feel what Elk felt, when solitude was in her nature and comfort was not. So instead she pulled down a higher branch to sample it, and waited for things to return to normal.

They hadn't by the next morning, when Moose was curled in a worn patch of shaded grass to rest off her night's exhaustion, Elk still wasn't near. She had gone back to the gate and lingered there, eating only the grass around it. She'd pace by it, sometimes, or stare beyond, or shove at it now and again. Expending what determination she had left, perhaps that same determination that had made her jump in the beginning, to choose a life here over a life lost.

As per routine, Moose took a place by her side, and they looked out together. And when Elk reached over and licked at Moose's ear, Moose didn't back away.

Elk, by nature, were herd animals. Moose, by nature, were not.

But two was company enough.

**Author's Note:**

> I, like most WolfQuest players, I assume, love Floppy. And one day, I decided Floppy could use a penmate/friend/love interest/whatever. And thus this little fic was born. Writing something without any dialogue was definitely interesting, and I thoroughly appreciate any feedback/critique/pointers you guys might have for me! Thanks for reading!


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